So my sojourn here is as much research as the wayward ramblings of a traveler. I move in and out of the city and with people without scholarship, fellowship, or institution I am affiliated with.  Now I know what, if I had known it, when my business went down; would have led me here to study Chinese and Taiji even as my business collapsed.

Though there is regret, it will most likely fade.  For being here is as impossible as the bookstore was.  It is a rarity.  If there are only a hundred black bookstores in the country, there are only a few of us throughout the centuries in America who have stood at the particular crossroads the black bookseller operates in.  For the black bookseller brokers in knowledge in ways that differ from the traditional academic.  It could be the black bookseller is allowed the illusion that black people's thoughts about  the black matter in ways that are marginalized by the simple demographics of the academic arena.  One might even refer to it as a segregated space.   The black bookseller demographics are customers with diverse ideas and demands they must answer to in order to survive.

The post Karibu world clarified for me that black booksellers are not part of academia.  I had imagined that books and the trade in knowledge, readings, study, craft, and discipline made me a member.  That is simply not the case.  The black bookseller is marginalized like the black book.  Perhaps because we sell Willie Lynch and the works of Dr.  Ben.  Maybe because black customers much like white customers don't always want something that is factual, but also desire entertainment.  Because the reach of academic and literary critics is limited in range, black booksellers trade in knowledge that is not always verified by the larger society, and the consequences such judgments places on blacks who trade in such knowledge are equivalent to standard marginalization.

Find a man or woman who is certain of the truth of their methods and it will give you some insight into who they think is worthy or unworthy.    The extra-ordinary success of the black book in the past few decades has made us more certain of what a good book is.  From here in China I often contemplate the certainty of Western humanitarian logic.  Contemplation from the black puts it all into question.  Whereas some may imagine that the black should pass by our negation and accept the transcendental values, it seems best to stop at the border line between the mundane and transcendent and contemplate the leap. For the leap to the transcendental is a leap of faith that hurdles over our ancestors and the simplicity of our predicament.  Indeed, if the humanities mattered, our mass mistreatment would have been incompatible with the concepts.  However, we know this is not the case.  The black was excluded from the concept.  If there is a question about humanity we should contemplate, it is how these exclusions occur.   The black bookseller like many of the blacks who are drawn to the humanities is conscious of this predicament, but more importantly, can find themselves distant from the limit imposed upon those who survive through the commerce of black ideas in the larger society.  The reason is that they make their living based upon what black people think, because black folks are their customers.

Do not confuse this with any notion of nobility.  In fact, the predicament is rather tragic.  In the larger society blacks are certain of their need to negotiate white institutions of power.  The black bookseller must do the same, but finds themselves pressed between the opinion of blacks, good or bad.  The infrastructure of the larger society must be engaged to do business, but they are not the dominant, only game in town reality, that seems to dominate much of academia and publishing.

I had no idea how dangerous or rare it was to imagine that black people mattered in such a way.  I completely underestimated the affects of living such a life on my consciousness.  Again, it is as much blessing as it is curse.  Free Black Space is born of the predicament.  It is possible and real, but also marginalized.  Though Free Black Space has always existed, rarely is it clearly synced with decision making and management.  Accounting, money, and financial management are among the most sacred transcendental concepts of the West.  In our black bookstore we integrated our thoughts about black culture with what we knew to be good financial decisions.  The result was failure and personal blame.  If only we had remembered those ideas were literally universal law and done as the books say.  The problem is if such rules had been followed, then the bookstore would have never existed.  Our bookstore was started by my wife and I with five-hundred dollars.  There's little nobility in such humble beginnings.  In fact, it is only gut wrenching survival that got us from point A to point B, but that dramatic war against the usual standards was hidden by the noble quest for community strength.

The dirty heart of the Karibu story is how all those matters were internalized within the business.  I'll admit one has to be a bit perceptive to see it in real time, and it took me a bit of time to do so.  But by that time it was too late.  When that happened the war had already begun.  The business had garnered enough success that we were legitimate enough to be analyzed and critiqued like white folks.  This had always occurred but had been balanced by the sense of the communal.  The Karibu story won't ever be told.  It can be neutered down to a personal quest for love or a catapult into a personal brand that symbolizes success and survival, complete with a renunciation and critique of men far greater than us, but it cannot be written as a continuum of struggle, activism, money, and the search for craft, discipline, and higher knowledge.

Free Black Space contests such limits and has always done so.  Free Black Space has always contained the story that has not been told.  Often, when I imagine my diverse interests and predicaments, I think that I don't really exist.  I am not convinced, as Dr. Valerie Prince has often reminded me over the years, that the black writes themselves into being.  In other words, the story does not create the reality.  I exist as that reality, independent of whether my story is crafted for consumption.  The Free Black Space focus on codes puts literature in proper context.  Much of what we imagine as literature are merely travel journals for white people who will never live your life. Your story is easily the foreign country that they choose to travel to for the price of the book.  It is an intellectual entertainment they can afford.  It is an intellectual entertainment blacks are trained to engage properly.  Black writing will continue to be immensely successful, because there is nothing more powerful than a statement by the negated that embraces the Western concept of the transcendental.  For blacks recognizing what the larger society views as transcendental is in fact the greatest compliment ever.  Though the arguments may suggest indictments, if you read the code-they are most often more American than America itself.  For blacks who choose to involve themselves in the world of arts and academia must be conscious of market forces like every other decent American.  That many of us imagine ourselves to operate outside of these dynamics is evidence of how powerful those forces are in shaping our egos.  We are in the mix.

With all that being said, the black bookseller is forced to engage black people where they are at as consumers.  The lesson like the story is too complicated to tell here.  It would be better to write another story, but that too is a problem.

As much as I have been trained by institutions of learning, I have been trained by black customers and black environments.  In fact, I might be a bit demented because of it.  Because I paid my own bills (the same reason I lost much of my wealth) I imagine things can be different.  It is where I have lived most of my life.  It is one of the reasons China excites me and much of the difference rolls off of me.

Here at Free Black Space, we have tried to focus on code.  For code like what exist in a computer program or its software can be run in multiple situations.  Humanities work does not function like code.  The limited creative work is presented as spectacle and stage performance, though like a song, can contain a "new" that changes the trends of the day.  The truth about the black innovative is a lie.  It is a thing we already know , finally acknowledged that makes it seems like we consistently invent in the arts.  We are reformulating the same codes into new forms to avoid our negation.  It may be this reinvention is spawned by the societies pressure on us, to never be classic.

Truth is I've been wandering since my business closed down.  Shit, I was wandering before then.  If there is a black code, I lived by it for many years.  The Karibu years for me represent a union of the concepts of family, God/Spirituality, art, and business.  I still consider all those categories important though they have been reshaped and reconfigured in my life.

Today, those same children I worked so hard for are now grown.  In some ways there is no change; but then again older children are different.  There is an ego that has been tempered by a cautiousness that scares me.  I don't have the same drive or aspirations, but still there is intent.

Yes, the business is gone, and the skill is still there, but I am still not ready to make money again.   Theft will do that to you.  So will confusion.  I could have come out of the mess a blood thirsty capitalist and may still do so; but I still have to wrestle with and resolve my initial intent.  It was simple.  To live a life in harmony with the ideas and beliefs that I thought was important.  To do what I thought was best and right.  To be righteous in my actions.  I have been humbled by things I have witnessed.  While I do not doubt some code of action or resolution, I am much more cautious about proclamations of my own moves towards what is best.  There's some ego it.  Failure and trials will teach you that.

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My first trip to China was on the eve of my bankruptcy.  Then I was as lost as I am now, but still mourning.  Even now I still mourn.  If nothing else China clarifies for me the personal aspirations and the what to do with money.  Then, I imagined that leveraging my assets into communal institutions was worthy goal. The black will never be communal in America unless all the money is up front.  We are an individualistic country and coming up from poverty it is every man/woman for himself.  The limit is hard to understand unless you have vested in it.  Just recently, as I trudged through the color of money it became more evident.  In money matters we seem trapped by the reality of our negative  value.  If there is a key to my failure in business, it was the degree to which I worked against that reality.  It was like trying to push water up hill.   I would never do such again.  It is so much like never, I hesitate to say the word, for fear the sense of the absolute would bring it back.  There is no honor in such devotion to the black.  It is one of the lessons of Karibu and like the Karibu story may be lost in the big wide world of the six billion who live and die everyday.

As for writing, I am more and more disconnected from the act of poetry.  Much of my life has been spent doing that.  The busy years of raising children, running a black bookstore, and then reading late into the night books by Yuseff Komunyakaa, A.Van Jordan, June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti, Yehuda Amichai, Pablo Neruda, Galway Kinnel, Stanley Plumly, and others seem to be over.  Though I will always love poetry and always write, at this point in time I have little concern over what happens outside of that.  It is a resignation that hurts.  It is not that I do not think I can write, nor that I refuse to study; but I consider the code flawed.  Argument, essays, and the like would not suffice.  It is beyond argument.  If there is something to be done as a poet let those who are smarter than me do it.  Admittedly, there is an isolation to my work, though I know a wide-range of beautiful scholars and intellectuals who continue to feed me and will continue to do so in the future.  I will continue to enjoy their company and their work.

Last I will have to say, what I find in China is a more sophisticated sense of culture that seems to reward the pursuit of the humanities.  Chinese mastery is much like the mastery I see in jazz or those African drummers and dancers like Mama Sylvia Soumah and Papa Aziz, who know the contours of art into the decades based on constant study, practice, and guidance within tradition.  In the end, it may be I arrive at China as a place of study because of the documented records and the particulars of their interaction within the West.  Where it not for the Tao Teh Ching, I would not be here studying Taiji.

It is not hard to imagine how ludicrous some of my approaches are now, given my training.  The black operates within a limit.  I am not supposed to be here.  The rarity of African Americans makes this undeniable, but it is even larger than that.  I should be in Africa.  Or I should be in an activist moment that seems to press itself against some tangible that gives recognizable victories in a code that limits all the outputs.  The movement towards Afro-Futurism gets at that.  For the imaginary future suggests a need to break the boundaries.  However, to call China imaginary is to disrespect the real time expressions of the country and its culture.  African Americans as members of one of the world's most powerful nations are not limited to seeking answers within the boundaries of that culture, or by extension the culture of the Western World.  King did that with India.   Malcolm did that with Islam.  China is different from both for many reasons that study will make obvious.

I am here because I want to be.  It is my path.  I was born into the black.  The view I bring to China is refined by the continuum I live in.  I stand upon my ancestors soldiers.  My Daddy would be proud.